Glubokii Boy

Yepp...
But what i would like even more...a toggle-state to get ridd of the intact windows...
Looks really out of place in a bombed out city...

Where these decission not made outside/above the scope of a normal CM scenario..?
That is...something like a battalion sizrd force..
Would a standard battalioncommander have any say in those matters at that time ?
 
 

Eastern front WW2....sure 
But WW1 ?
Imo...NO !
A WW1 game would be pretty much limited to artillery and infantry i fear...
Sure...late war there where a few tanks around but not a great variation of those...germany for example only had one i belive...fielded at the very end of the war...and these machines where not exactelly fast...perhaps not superfun gameplay...
Same thing goes for support weapons...would we have all that many to chose from that could be brought forward to join the infantry in an advance ?
A WW1 game would probably be fun for a while but imo it would soon become quite repetative and boring compared to the other CM titles
If we ever are to experience early tank warfare i would very much prefer to do it in 1939, 40 Poland, France or north Afrika 😎
 
 

It would require quite the effort on the part of BFC to give you all that though...If they could do it fairly easy...then by all means...go ahead and do it...and I would buy it ! 😁...
But how long has it taken them to complete ONE year of the WESTERN front during WW2 ?
10 years or something like that (CMBN to the final modul of CMFB) 🥱...
Granted...a WW1 game would probably be faster to develop due to less complicated TOEs if nothing else...far fewer vehichles to design etc...but how much faster ? 3 times ? 4 times ?
To include the early year fluid battles, the other fronts appart from the western,  the later years to allow for some armour...etc, etc...
It would mean lots and lots of work...taking MANY years to complete....or should they perhaps only do a 1918 game and forgett about the rest ?
Or do you see WW1 as a CM3 game
CM2 has been around for a long time now and Imo they still have a lot of things left in WW2 to complete before CM3 comes around
To namne one...the eastern front 😁...
I agree with you though that it would be nice to try something different...
The current WW2 games are pretty simular
A Sherman tank is still a Sherman tank regardless of if it has a red or a white star painted on it...and a Tiger is still a Tiger regardless of if its fighting in France, Italy or Russia...
Therefore i think it would be a good idea if BFC could skip staight to Barbarossa and go forward from there...instead of taking small steps backwards from 44 to 43 to 42...
The change of equipment will be to small this way to feel completally fresh...and something new...
A skip straight to 41 though would allow us to try something new...
As would north africa...
Not doing a WW1 game is obviously a personal prefrence....i would much more prefer that they concentrated on WW2 compared to devoting time to a completally new multi year, multi front game that would souk up precious resorces...
Their current releaserate is simply to slow to embark on such a project imo...
 
 
 
 

There are three Volkssturn uniform types in the module, the greatcoat (seen in the DAR), civilian and military. Civilian uniforms don't go above NCO, any higher rank gets the military uniform. Officer greatcoats are military style with the rank on the collar. Only the senior officer gets a belt because he's carrying a sidearm. Everyone else is entirely free of gear, rather like CMSF2 'combatants', only able to carry as much ammo as they can stuff into their pockets.

It would require quite the effort on the part of BFC to give you all that though...If they could do it fairly easy...then by all means...go ahead and do it...and I would buy it ! 😁...
But how long has it taken them to complete ONE year of the WESTERN front during WW2 ?
10 years or something like that (CMBN to the final modul of CMFB) 🥱...
Granted...a WW1 game would probably be faster to develop due to less complicated TOEs if nothing else...far fewer vehichles to design etc...but how much faster ? 3 times ? 4 times ?
To include the early year fluid battles, the other fronts appart from the western,  the later years to allow for some armour...etc, etc...
It would mean lots and lots of work...taking MANY years to complete....or should they perhaps only do a 1918 game and forgett about the rest ?
Or do you see WW1 as a CM3 game
CM2 has been around for a long time now and Imo they still have a lot of things left in WW2 to complete before CM3 comes around
To namne one...the eastern front 😁...
I agree with you though that it would be nice to try something different...
The current WW2 games are pretty simular
A Sherman tank is still a Sherman tank regardless of if it has a red or a white star painted on it...and a Tiger is still a Tiger regardless of if its fighting in France, Italy or Russia...
Therefore i think it would be a good idea if BFC could skip staight to Barbarossa and go forward from there...instead of taking small steps backwards from 44 to 43 to 42...
The change of equipment will be to small this way to feel completally fresh...and something new...
A skip straight to 41 though would allow us to try something new...
As would north africa...
Not doing a WW1 game is obviously a personal prefrence....i would much more prefer that they concentrated on WW2 compared to devoting time to a completally new multi year, multi front game that would souk up precious resorces...
Their current releaserate is simply to slow to embark on such a project imo...
 
 
 
 

It would require quite the effort on the part of BFC to give you all that though...If they could do it fairly easy...then by all means...go ahead and do it...and I would buy it ! 😁...
But how long has it taken them to complete ONE year of the WESTERN front during WW2 ?
10 years or something like that (CMBN to the final modul of CMFB) 🥱...
Granted...a WW1 game would probably be faster to develop due to less complicated TOEs if nothing else...far fewer vehichles to design etc...but how much faster ? 3 times ? 4 times ?
To include the early year fluid battles, the other fronts appart from the western,  the later years to allow for some armour...etc, etc...
It would mean lots and lots of work...taking MANY years to complete....or should they perhaps only do a 1918 game and forgett about the rest ?
Or do you see WW1 as a CM3 game
CM2 has been around for a long time now and Imo they still have a lot of things left in WW2 to complete before CM3 comes around
To namne one...the eastern front 😁...
I agree with you though that it would be nice to try something different...
The current WW2 games are pretty simular
A Sherman tank is still a Sherman tank regardless of if it has a red or a white star painted on it...and a Tiger is still a Tiger regardless of if its fighting in France, Italy or Russia...
Therefore i think it would be a good idea if BFC could skip staight to Barbarossa and go forward from there...instead of taking small steps backwards from 44 to 43 to 42...
The change of equipment will be to small this way to feel completally fresh...and something new...
A skip straight to 41 though would allow us to try something new...
As would north africa...
Not doing a WW1 game is obviously a personal prefrence....i would much more prefer that they concentrated on WW2 compared to devoting time to a completally new multi year, multi front game that would souk up precious resorces...
Their current releaserate is simply to slow to embark on such a project imo...
 
 
 
 

I think WW1 is not a good fit for the CM engine. It would be much more suitable for Graviteam games.

Eastern front WW2....sure 
But WW1 ?
Imo...NO !
A WW1 game would be pretty much limited to artillery and infantry i fear...
Sure...late war there where a few tanks around but not a great variation of those...germany for example only had one i belive...fielded at the very end of the war...and these machines where not exactelly fast...perhaps not superfun gameplay...
Same thing goes for support weapons...would we have all that many to chose from that could be brought forward to join the infantry in an advance ?
A WW1 game would probably be fun for a while but imo it would soon become quite repetative and boring compared to the other CM titles
If we ever are to experience early tank warfare i would very much prefer to do it in 1939, 40 Poland, France or north Afrika 😎
 
 

Eastern front WW2....sure 
But WW1 ?
Imo...NO !
A WW1 game would be pretty much limited to artillery and infantry i fear...
Sure...late war there where a few tanks around but not a great variation of those...germany for example only had one i belive...fielded at the very end of the war...and these machines where not exactelly fast...perhaps not superfun gameplay...
Same thing goes for support weapons...would we have all that many to chose from that could be brought forward to join the infantry in an advance ?
A WW1 game would probably be fun for a while but imo it would soon become quite repetative and boring compared to the other CM titles
If we ever are to experience early tank warfare i would very much prefer to do it in 1939, 40 Poland, France or north Afrika 😎
 
 

I missed that guy...seen it now 😊
Thanks...
Thinking about it Elvis also managed to take out atleast 1 armored car with his AT-rifles...
Good stuff ! 😁

I think that ones these mastermaps gets slized up and used in scenarios...to include far more debree and piles of rubble...to provide cover and limit LOF as well as restrict vehichle modemet...
Infantry will play a larger part in the 'tankhunting task'...the life of a tanker will be more difficult 😊..
On this map LOS/LOF seems to be pretty far...making it a bit hard for the infantry to get to the tanks

I think Ithikial has done very well so far considdering he only has green troops...
His initial agressive moves have been vital i belive...getting into possition first.
But can he hold it ? 😎
Non of the players have been able to employ hand-held AT-weapons so far i belive...
The germans do not seem to have any schrecks...only fausts.
It would have been kind of cool to have seen the odd flamethrower (besides the russian tanks) included in the force mix...

You could try Jason D Mark's, Island of Fire, it was recently re-released. Half way through it switches and provides more detail from the Soviet perspective at the level you are looking for. Bloody Streets looks good.
Thanks, it available cheap on Kindle at the moment.
Yes, similar format. You have a LOT of reading to do. 😃 The books are massive. Watch out for book 3 is split into two parts/books, I was caught out by this. Some good third party maps and/or a magnifying glass are useful. There was a website that I used that had all of the Wehrmacht maps day by day but they seem to have taken them all down.

I think it should be up to the scenario designer. In some cases, it would make sense to have reinforcements arrive immediately, or very soon after triggering.

Thanks for the info, Ithikial.
Things are sounding good. I have a question about indirect vs. direct HE and infantry displacement behavior, though. Yes, if an infantry unit in a building starts taking direct HE fire, the best choice is to displace asap (out of LOS of course, not into the enemy unit's LOS via front door, etc). However, the opposite is true for indirect HE if that means running out of the building. I sure hope that's been taken into account and factored in. I've done a lot of testing on my urban map and infantry hiding on bottom floors can weather a substantial amount of powerful arty with minimal to moderate casualties. But, if they run out of the building, they're toast.  Just recently, I was testing some QB setups and noticed large swaths of AI infantry who didn't set up hidden driven out of very protective buildings to their deaths by arty. It was night and day vs. some earlier non-QB testing where they stayed hidden in place.

I've got permission from BFCElvis to post about something a little to the side of this content.
Fixing the Hedgerow Bug
It's perhaps most prevalent in CMBN given the abundance of hedgerow maps/scenarios but applies across all titles for infantry behind hard cover. You may have noticed my Green troops in this battle have not been running away or into the streets towards the enemy during these firefights with the Soviet infantry.
This whole DAR has been using a version of the F&R beta that includes some tweaks to the TacAI to address infantry bolting from cover when coming under small arms fire. Infantry that come under small arms fire are more likely to seek cover and 'cower' rather than displace, even when pinned/rattled. Infantry are more likely to bolt when under attack from high explosives... (which let's face it makes sense. )
The changes I've noticed:
- It becomes very hard to dislodge infantry already set up in a building or behind a wall. Even when you lose LOS/LOF there's a good chance your opponent is still there. (I've joked it's going to take naval shells to dislodge Veteran troops).
- Getting the jump on the enemy while they are moving / before they are set up and ready to seek cover still causes morale to collapse very quickly. Case in point: like when most of my Pioneer platoon evaporated under SMG fire within 30 seconds.
- Infantry taking persistent casualties will still suffer morale damage over the long term. Like my Volkssturm surrendering after a solid five minutes of constant rifle fire back and forth.
- Expect longer drawn out firefights in urban and hedgerow maps. That also means watching those ammo counters more closely.
- High explosive and flame options just became a lot more valuable in urban combat. Close quarter AVRE or M12 GMC anyone?
 
Still being tested and subject to change but there are positive signs among the beta testers so far.
All for now.

... and another

That's all I seem to be able to upload for now, so for more look at the DropBox folder linked above ...
LS

A little preamble to this taster ... 
I grew up in rural Dorset in the south of England where our countryside is not so different than that of Normandy (though the Cider may be a bit stronger!). So whenever I fire up CMBN and gaze upon the monotonous green of the bocage, I start to dream of my younger days spent amongst the hedgerows of my native land. Those hedgerows, mostly long gone now, were so thick that we could actually burrow our way inside and create 'dens' where no adult, or rival gang, could find us. So, with some time to spare thanks to COVID-19, I got to thinking about the bocage in BN and wondered what could I do to make it into something like I imagined it to be. Well, the answer is not a great deal - the models for the bocage are hard to figure out, and even with new textures, it's not ever going to get close to what it probably should be, alas. But, having tinkered with the bocage for some time, and been inspired by @Falaise's treatment of those oddly uniform brush textures, I had a go at a lot of the other textures - trees, bushes, grass etc.
So, to cut through the waffle, here are a couple of tasters (some caveats first: it's not ready yet, I just couldn't wait to share some goodness, it will be a couple of weeks yet as I'm trying to iron-out some of the strange in-game distortions; I think this 'plays' best at, or near, ground level just because of the way the game handles LOD and stuff, from afar it's not really going to have much of an effect; screen caps are taken whilst running ReShade, hence the colours are much more muted and some effects are, well, effecting the images (at the end is a pic without ReShade for comparison); I design these for my own gaming pleasure so YMMV will apply when released; I have quite a few other tweaked textures that I may release at the same time just to give the complete 'look' - these are mostly not my work but rather tweaks of mods by luminaries such as @EZ, Aris ( @Fuser ), @Flesh, @Vein, @Kieme(ITA) to name but a few; these textures will be high res and if you want to use the ReShade 'look' then you'll need a decent graphics card in a Windows machine, I will release a lower res version. Enough ... some pics:
( You can study high res versions in my DropBox folder here )



More below 🙂

This makes sence but hopefully he agrees with the fact that things like...
- more AI groups
- more objective/trigger slots
- reinforcements by trigger
- timed objectives
- a new trigger option for AI group casualtylevel higher then XXX
- A new timing option for waypoints that is based on tlme on location rather then the game clock...
- A remake of the dreadful/very unintuetive AI artillery program interface...
- A way to set some kind of value in zone limitation on triggers and objectives...
And a number of other suggestions that have been mentioned with regnard to the AI and objectives, triggers and reinforcement options 
Would not require the scenario designer to 'write code'...but rather be pretty signifikant quality of lite improvements that would simplyfy scenariodesign and make them better...
A lot of frustration could be avoided imo 😎

As i understand it...BFC makes most of their money on other things then the public CM2 games...
I guess they need it...because this releaserate is not good !! Its hard to make any money if they have no new products to sell.
I don't really like the current trend of comments about their products comming from BFC either...
Everything is to big...to complicated  🙁
- CMSF2 was to big, to complicated..
- R-tv was to big, to complicated..
- Fire and rubble is...to big and complicated.
It's really sad that they can't release their products faster...because if they could...they would most certainly sell..
It's a bad situation imo....
 

That static defence custom QB-trick sounds like a nice idea 🙂...
But as for giving the AI greater freedom to act on its own...i'm  not so sure.
If BFC could make it work...yeah that would be great but i fear that features such as you describe might be a bit more complicated...
Simply having LOS/LOF to an action square might not help the AI enough...what kind of enemy unit is comming ? where are the other enemies/friendlies ? What are they doing ? Where should the AI units regroup to ? Why  ?
There are a lot of things the AI will need to considder...not only for each induvidual unit but also as a force as a whole.
I doubt it would be able to do it...
I would prefer that BFC moved in the opposit direction and gave the scenariodesigner MORE tools to 'help' the AI...providing for better scripting...
- more AI groups 
- more trigger options like AI group casualty level higher then, unit killed (friendly or enemy), unit spotted,  AI group ammo level below...etc,etc
- more options for when reinforcements arrive.
- more objective options
- a new AI artillery programing interface that would allow the designer to specify indirect firesupport for the AI mid game among other things.
 
 

One way to expand on your original idea might be...
Instead of painting pretty much the entire defensive zone for each AI-group...One could perhaps be a little more 'picky' 😎
That is...
Make one AI group (or a few)for AT-guns, one group (or a few) for HMGs, simular for perhaps armour, tankhunters and finally regular rifle squads...
Instead of painting the entire defensive zone...for the AT-gun group you only paint every good and decent area of the defensive zone sutable to deploy AT-guns in...And perhaps if you want to even some less good possitions.
Do the same for the HMG group...paint pretty much all of the good and decent possitions to site and HMG in.
And go on like this for all the groups...
This will give the AI a pretty high level of freedom but still help it avoid the really stupid, wierd set-up choises for the different weapons.
 

A few things that imo makes designing attacking AI difficult...
Number one ! The inability of the AI to reevaluate the situation. The AI will NEVER change its attackplan...ever. Not on its own atleast. It has one way forward and one way forward only regardless of how the player defences are set-up. A skilled designer may be able to design the AI plans in such a way that it seeems as if the AI is adjusting its original plan when running into strong resistance. To be able to do this the designer will pretty much have to 'guess' right though as to what the players defence set-up will look like. If he guess wrong the outcome will simply look wierd...if the AI abandons a succesful attack !
Number two...The limited number of AI groups. For a reinforced company sized attack 16 AI groups may well be enough but for a reinforced battalion it is a bit on the low side. Unfortunatelly...If the player commands something like a company sized force then the attacking AI will pretty much need atleast a battalion to provide much of a challange...unless the forces are very unballanced. I belive that one of the reasons for the AI attacks currently often looking like suiccidal human wawe attacks are indeed the lack of sufficient AI groups.
Number three...perhaps not so much of a problem...but to a degree atleast...the low tempo of an AI attack...atleast when conducted over somewhat larger distances. imo ones the AI units gets pinned down it can often take quite some time for them to recover and move forward again...Far longer then it would take a human player to get the same units moving again...They sort of 'get stuck' it seems...
number four...The limited ability of the AI to get HE and smoke on the right location at the right time...(has improved somewhat with the on-map mortar trick)
 

True ..😎
But this has been equally true all through the CM2 timeframe...has it not ?